In the healthcare arena, clinical information is gathered from patients who regularly give vague or inexact date references. For example, a patient may be asked to recall when he or she had his or her last tetanus, or similar, shot or vaccination. In response, the patient may state “when I was three years old” or “about ten years ago.” Responses such as these may be difficult to capture in any useful manner.
In many instances the physician, nurse, or other healthcare employee, may be completing an electronic form or filling in a database with the information attained from the patient representing the patient's medical history. The information may be used to create a chronology of the medical-related events that have occurred, or will occur, throughout the patient's lifetime.
It is often, therefore, not only necessary that the healthcare employee be able to input the data references in a format that is accepted by the electronic form or database he or she is completing, but also that the date references be at least somewhat consistent so that they can be compared and sequenced relative to various other date references provided by the patient.
In many instances, the healthcare employee is forced to take what the patient stated (e.g., “when I was three years old”) and make an on-the-spot calculation of the date the patient must have been referring to (e.g., by calculating from the patient's birth date), which can be quite imprecise and time consuming. In addition, there is often no way to input dates, whether calculated by the healthcare employee or specifically provided by the patient, that are incomplete or partial, for example where the patient states “sometime in August of 2005.” It may further not be possible using existing applications for inputting date references and creating histories and chronologies, to differentiate between dates that are exact and known with certainty (e.g., where the patients states “My last flu shot was on May 10, 2003) and dates that are merely an approximation (e.g., where the patient states “around Jul. 15, 2006).
Similar issues may arise in many other areas not related to the healthcare arena where date references are needed, but are often not known with any certainty or exactness. For example, one other area may include the auto repair business where it may be necessary to know when the tires on an individual's car were last rotated or when the engine was last serviced. In response, the car owner may merely state “last summer,” and this may be sufficiently exact for whatever purposes that date is needed.
A need, therefore, exists for an improved method of capturing inexact date information in an efficient manner that enables the date information to be consistently stored and subsequently used, for example, in relation to other date references similarly captured.